Czeching Out

We’ve been in Prague long enough now that I’ve started to pick up on the language, and I feel I could survive here for a while with these words in my Czech vocabulary arsenal:  cigarety, alkohol, toalety, policie, telefony, and notebooky.  How’s that for an aspiring linguist?  Unfortunately, I won’t get to practice my new words since we left the grand old city of Prague this morning, and we’re now headed to Krakow, Poland, on a seven-hour PolzkiBus ride.  Unlike our last bus ride from Berlin to Prague, the coach has no movie player installed on the seats, but they do have free wifi—it just doesn’t work, and judging from the high-pitched beep I’m hearing every five minutes, the smoke detector in the toalety needs replacing.  So, we’ll settle in for a drive through the eastern European countryside and reflect on our time in the Czech Republic.

We kept our agenda for the last full day in Prague light and eased up on the kids a bit with their schoolwork since they had worked hard each day to get ahead in their studies.  Their only assignment on this day was to write a brief blog post on any aspect of our trip so far.  Deena and I used the morning to relax, read, and do a little research on our upcoming destinations.  We had a late lunch of ham and cheese baguette sandwiches, chips, and apples, and then decided to wrap up our afternoon with a relaxing visit to the Museum of Communism right off Wenceslas Square, the site of the Velvet Revolution twenty-seven years ago.  

The museum is located on the second floor of a building that houses a casino on the first floor with a McDonalds right next door—that’s enough capitalism to make Lenin sit straight up in his crystal sarcophagus.  A lady we met at church last Sunday recommend this place to us as an inexpensive, informative way to spend a couple hours, and that was a good tip—we learned a lot more about communism and the history of the Czech Republic.  A tourist brochure we read when we first arrived in Prague had a section on living with the locals, and one of the bullet points mentioned that the Czech people complain about everything all the time:  the weather, the streets, their work, each other—I had to check the front of the brochure again to make sure it didn’t say “Americans." After strolling the halls of the Museum of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia, I honestly don’t see how the Czech people have anything to complain about these days.  The communist party line was pushed to the extreme in this country, and if one didn’t tow it, one was taken away, interrogated, whupped with a big stick, and sent to a camp where there were no water slides or tacos for dinner.  Once again, I found the examples of propaganda to be the most interesting exhibits, and the posters depicting socialist realism were the creepiest I’ve seen yet.  The kids thought it was interesting and unusual to see the United States portrayed as an evil enemy in a lot of the artwork.  Our visit culminated in a viewing of the museum’s excellent short film that showed the demonstrations surrounding the Velvet Revolution through the use of actual news footage.  Parts of the film were disturbing as we watched the military and plainclothes policemen savagely beat citizens, including women and the photographers themselves, in an attempt to quell the demonstrations that would eventually lead to the government transfer of power in 1989.

It's my communist party and I'll fake smile if I want to

A Big Pile o' Communism

We enjoyed coffee and apricot sundaes in the outdoor seating area of the next door McDonalds, and after our tour of the Museum of Communism, this fun diversion seemed a miracle in a city and country that has experienced so much crushing oppression.  The global events of the last one hundred years are complex and intricately connected and difficult for even the most astute historian to follow, especially from a book.  At each point in our journey so far, Deena and I have engaged the children in a time of review to place the history of events in each city and country in context with the history of world events in the twentieth century —we try to include ice cream in this time to encourage maximum cooperation.  In the process, we’re all starting to visualize a unique timeline that doesn’t follow a straight plane, but undulates with waves of human triumphs and tragedies over the last century.  The study of history always shows these peaks and valleys like the printout from a seismograph, but the lines are closer together and more static from recent decades.

The Old Town Square drew us back one last time, and we arrived just as the astronomical clock celebrated the top of another hour in the city we’ve come to love in the last nine days.  We had plenty of time to explore the many aspects of Prague that until twenty-five years ago, were hidden from most of the world.  Our neighborhood streets became familiar and comfortable as we walked to the grocery stores and tram stops, and we eased into a low-pressure routine after many weeks of more intense travel.  The citizens here may complain a lot, but they’re well aware of the attributes of their city, as evidenced by the attention to detail and decoration of even the most recently built structures.  I will miss the scrolled frieze work and pastel facades of the buildings along the Moldau, and no matter where we roam, I’ll always look up over every door casing hoping to see a smiling stone sculpture welcoming me in the manner of Prague as I cross another threshold.